samedi 9 décembre 2017

European Union, Euro-skepticism, Western Civilization, Eurasianism and Slavic WorldBoris Nad (Serbia) interviews Robert Steuckers (Brussels)Q.: The
European Union, in fact the entire European continent, is in a deep
crisis today. The impression is that this crisis is primarily the result
of a crisis of ideas. Political ideologies, and first of all
liberalism, are deplored, obsolete, anachronistic. We can also say the
same for other parts of the political spectrum. Do you share this
impression?A.:
Well, the first idea that comes in my mind is one derived from Moeller
van den Bruck’s articles in the Twenties : the people that have adopted
and assimilated liberalism die after some decades because they will have
lost their organic stamina. Liberalism is thus a disease before being a
mere mentality. Liberalism and modernism are akin because both refuse
to accept permanencies in the political City.

In the 17th
century, you had on philosophical and literary level the so-called
quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, which took several
aspects, some of them may well be considered retrospectively as positive
but nevertheless there is an etymological connection between
“modernism” and the French word “mode”, i. e. fashion, “mode” being
always transitory and can be changed at will. When you consider all
things political as mere “modes”, you thrive to escape the very pressure
of reality which is made of time and space. All necessities, derived
from the acceptance of the limits implied by time or space, are
perceived by the Moderns as burdens that you should get rid of. Today
you don’t even have to try to get rid of them but to wipe them out
thoroughly or to transform them so that they acquire a new fully
artificial and therefore transitory dimension. This is the essence of
liberalism. But even if liberalism has its roots in the 17th and 18th
centuries, it has never been, at least after the Battle of Waterloo in
1815, a powerful political movement, the conservative or Christian
democratic in a first period, the socialist movement in later decades
could temper liberalism’s rejection of realities and permanencies. Even
if the official liberal parties, being more liberal-conservative than
liberal in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word, were rather
quantitatively weaker than the two other main political families in
Europe, the anti-political spirit that was indeed the fundament of its
core ideology could ran into the thoughts of the Christian democrats
(despite the Church doctrine) and of the social-democrats (despite their
watered down Marxism). Gradually the conservative, the Christian
democrats and the social-democrats took over most of the ideas of basic
liberalism.

France was partially spared because it had a “caudillist” leadership introduced by De Gaulle in 1958 after the collapse of the 4th
Republic, that was genuinely liberal. The personality of the President
could prevent the liberals and the main parties to phagocytize the
political body. But this was only a respite as we’ll see. In 1945,
Europe was destroyed by the war. It took a bit more than a decade to
recover, especially in Germany. But once the horrors cleared, Europe
could reach economic power again. France in the Sixties, being a
permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations, could
claim more independence within the West. For the United States, it was
time to inject a new and stronger dose of liberal poison into the
European political bodies. The United States has as ideology all the
poisons needed to contaminate the world, i. e. not only the reality
denying Enlightenment you find in Western Europe but also the basic
puritanical denegation of the medieval European heritage, a denegation
that was sweetened during the first decades of the 18th
century by the deist movement and the Whigs. The American colonists
developed the sense of a mission in the world that combined puritanical
fanaticism and enlightened liberalism, apparently softer but
nevertheless radical in its hate against inherited traditions and
institutions. The
more radical underlying principles were adapted to the Zeitgeist of the
Fifties and the Sixties by think tanks lead ultimately by the OSS
(“Office of Strategic Studies”). This created the perverse corpus of May
68 that was launched into Germany and France. Both countries could
resist in the Seventies although their societies were all the same
contaminated by the bacillus that was eroding gradually their
traditional psychological assets. A second wave had to be prepared to
give all the Western societies the last blow to let their political
bodies crumble down. Next to the May 68 ideology, more or less derived
from the Frankfurt School, a new weapon was forged to destroy Europe
(and partly the rest of the world) more efficiently. This weapon was the
infamous Thatcherite neoliberalism. At the very end of the Seventies,
neoliberalism (be it Thatcherism or Reaganomics) was celebrated as a new
liberation ideology that was about to get rid of the political
State-centered praxis. Neither the Christian democrats nor the
social-democrats were able to resist staunchly and to remember their
supporters that the Church doctrine (based on Thomas Aquino and
Aristoteles) or the interventionist socialist tradition were genuinely
hostile to such an unbridled liberalism. Economics became more important
than politics. We entered at that very moment the so-called
post-history where no marks were still to be found. Even worse, the
corrupt “partitocratic” system, in which Christian democrats and
social-democrats were painfully muddling through, prevented any rational
reaction and any challenge from new parties, blocking the democratic
process they so vehemently pretend to incarnate alone.Europe
is now in a blind alley and seems unable to escape the liberalism of
May 68 as well as neoliberalism as new challenging forces seems unable
to gather enough votes to get into power effectively. You have to take
into account that the conventional forces have been in power since
almost 70 years and have literally occupied all the institutions by
nominating officers at all levels, who couldn’t be replaced
instantaneously by new really efficient people. Challengers risk
launching newcomers into realms they are unable to master. Q.: Europe
is, as you say, in a blind street. The European Union has been hit by a
political, economic, immigrant crisis ... Then a wave of terrorism
followed. European political bodies and institutions seem paralyzed. So
far, European integration was threatened by so-called Euro-skeptical
movements. It seems that today we are at the beginning of a wave of
secessionism, like the one in Catalonia, which shakes many European
countries. What is your relationship to that?A.:
Some secret services beyond the Atlantic have as a policy to weaken
Europe by regular non military attacks typical of the so-called “Fourth
Generation Warfare”. Economic stratagems, stock exchange manipulations
are the usual tricks used by those whose main aim is to prevent Europe
to develop fully, to find a better autonomy in all political and
military matters, to reach a quite high welfare enabling rewarding
R&D, to develop a strong commercial relationship with both Russia
and China. Therefore Europe should constantly be undermined by all kind
of troubles. Chirac’s France was the best example, beyond the well-known
psy-ops that the “color revolutions” are. France is still a nuclear
power but cannot develop this capacity beyond a certain level: in 1995,
when experiments where performed in the Pacific Ocean, Greenpeace, as a
pseudo-ecological movement tried to torpedo them. But on French
territory, strikes paralyzed the country, orchestrated by a socialist
trade union that had been anti-communist in the Fifties and had received
support by the OSS. Social-democrats and socialist trade-unionists had
secretly an Atlanticist support what’s often forgotten nowadays.

To
get rid of Chirac, who had supported a phantom alliance between Paris,
Berlin and Moscow at the time of the 2003 Bush’ invasion of Iraq, the
activists among the African migrants communities in the dreary suburbs
near Paris launched a series of violent riots in November 2005 after a
first minor incident that caused accidentally two deadly casualties.
Eventually the riots extended to other cities like Lyon and Lille. As
the New Right writer Guillaume Faye had previously told it: France in
the present-day situation is totally unable to reestablish law and order
when riots spread in more than three or four big urban areas. The riots
lasted the time needed to promote a new previously obscure petty
politician, Nicolas Sarközy, who promised to wipe out the troublemakers
in the suburbs and did of course absolutely nothing once in power.

Charles Rivkin, US ambassador in France is the theorist of this “4th Generation Warfare” operations aiming at exciting migrant communities against law and order in France (see: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2011/03/21/t...
). This vicious strategy was only possible in France ten or twelve
years ago as no other European country had such a huge amount of
migrants among its population. The refugee crisis that hit Germany in
2015 is a next chapter in the sad story of Europe’s submersion and
neutralization. Germany has now to face the same violent communities as
France did and does. The purpose is evidently to weaken the country that
is thriving industrially due to the excellent commercial links it has
with Eurasia in general. The aim of the British and American secret
services has always been to prevent any German-Russian connection. Now
Germany is weakened by the critical mass of the million fake refugees
that will rapidly let collapse the social security system that has
always been the peculiar mark of German social systems (be they
Bismarckian, national-socialist, Christian-democratic or
social-democratic).

The
complete destabilization of the European industrial societies (Sweden,
France, Germany, Italy and partially the Low Countries) lead to social
and political shifts that sometimes take the shape of so-called
“populist movements” that the media frantically label as “extreme
rightist” or “neo-fascist”, in order to stop their development. Till now
they have been unable to get a serious share of power, the conventional
parties having infiltrated all institutions (press, media, justice,
banks, etc.). In Spain, which is a poorer country that doesn’t attract
the migrants as the given material advantages are less interesting, the
only possible lever to launch a “4th Generation Warfare”
operation against the country was the Catalan micro-nationalism. If
Catalonia secedes, one of the most industrialized provinces of
historical Spain will leave a commonwealth that exists since the
marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinando of Aragon in 1469. This
would mean a serious setback for Spain, which is already fragile, and
would have to depend from the neighboring countries, i. e. from an also
destabilized France and a Germany that has to cope with its refugee
problem and with an erosion of its social security system, leading to
general dissatisfaction, to a rejection of the conventional political
parties and eventually to a further development of the challenging
AfD-party, whereby Merkel becomes unable to build an ideologically
coherent majority for her next government. My
position is to say that all this problems currently jeopardizing
Europe’s future have not occurred by pure coincidence. They are all
linked together even if, by saying that, I’ll inevitably be accused of
manipulating a “diabolical causality” or to adhere to “plot theories”.
But I don’t see the Devil here as a supernatural being but I simply use
the word as an easy image to stigmatize real forces and endeavors that
try to shape the world according to their own interests. But on this
same chessboard, the Europeans are unable to spot the enemy and to
define their own interests.Q.: In 2016, you published the book The European Enterprise: Geopolitical Essays.
It explores the historical, cultural and spiritual foundations of the
main European empires, i.e. the Reich principle, which is not equivalent
to "nation" (If I understand it well), you consider that the natural
development of Europe has been hampered or avoided by the "Western
civilization". You pay special attention to the "Russian theme" - the
Russian space and the concept of Eurasia. Why is it necessary in the era
of globalization or attempts by the United States to impose itself as a
world hegemon, or to "globalize" its own political and economic model?A.:
Indeed I’ve explored and I’ll continue to explore the European past as
amnesia is the worst illness a political body can suffer of. You cannot
think Europe without thinking simultaneously the notion of Empire and
the so-called “Roman form”. Carl Schmitt was very conscious of being the
heir of the “Roman form”, be it heathen/imperial or Catholic or
inherited by the “German Nation”. No one is currently denying the
importance of Schmitt in the realm of political theory. Some circles of
the American New Left, like the “Telos Press”, have even promoted his
works in the New World beyond all the hopes the few German students of
Schmitt’s works had ever dreamt of. The Roman Empire was geographically
and hydrographically based on the Mediterranean Sea and the Danube
River: the “Middle Sea” assuring communication between the Rhone Valley
and Egypt, between Greece and Hispania, etc. and the Danube link between
Southern Germany and the Black Sea and beyond this Pontic Area the
legendary Colchis and Persia what will later be mythologized by the
Chivalry Order of the Golden Fleece created by Philip, Duke of Burgundy
in 1430.

After
the fall of the Roman Empire, there was the well-known “translatio
imperii ad Francos” and later, after the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, a
“translatio imperii ad Germanos”. The central part of Europe became so
the core of the Empire, being centered now on the Rhine, the Rhone and
the Po. The Danube axis was cut at the level of the “Iron Gates” beyond
which the Byzantine area extended far to the East. The Byzantine Empire
was the direct heir of the Roman Empire: there the legitimacy was never
disputed. The Mount Athos community is a spiritual center that has
recently be fully recognized by the Russian President Putin. The
Roman-German Empire (later Austrian-Hungarian), the Russian Empire as
heir of Byzantium and the Mount Athos religious community partake the
same symbols of a golden flag with a black double-headed eagle, remnant
of a very old Persian traditional cult where birds assured the link
between Earth and Heavens, between men and the gods. The eagle being the
most majestic bird flying to the highest heights in the sky, it became
obviously the symbol of the sacred dimension of Empire.

Living
within the territorial frames of an Empire means to fulfill a spiritual
task: to establish on Earth a similar harmony as the one displayed by
the celestial order. The dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit in Christian
tradition has indeed the same symbolic task as the eagle in imperial
tradition: assuring the link between the Uranic realm (Greek
Uranus/Vedic Varuna) and the Earth (Gaia). As the subject of an Empire,
I’m compelled to dedicate all my life trying to reach the perfection of
the apparently perfect order of the celestial bodies. It’s an ascetic
and military duty featured by the archangel Michael, also a figure
derived from the man/bird beings of the Persian mythology that the
Hebrews brought back from their Babylonian captivity. Emperor Charles V
tried to incarnate this Chivalry’s ideal despite the petty human sins he
consciously committed during his life. He remained truly human, a
sinner, and dedicated all his efforts to keep the Empire alive, to make
of it a dam against decay, which is the task of the “katechon” according
to Carl Schmitt. No one better than the Frenchman Denis Crouzet has
described this perpetual tension the Emperor lived in his marvelous
book, Charles Quint, Empereur d’une fin des temps, Odile Jacob,
Paris, 2016. I’m reading this very thick book over and over again which
will help me to precise my imperial world view and to understand better
what Schmitt meant when he considered Church and Empire as
‘katechonical” forces. This chapter is far from being closed.

Crouzet
explains in his book that the German and European Reformation wanted to
“precipitate” things, aspiring at the same time to experiment lively
the “eschaton”, the end of the world. This precipitation theology is the
very first outward sign of modernism. Luther in a quite moderate way
and the other actors of Reformation in an extreme way wanted the end of a
world (of a historical continuity) they considered as profoundly
infected by evil. Charles V, explains Crouzet, has an imperial and
“katechonical” attitude. As an Emperor and a servant of God on Earth, he
has to slow down the “eschaton” process to preserve his subjects from
the afflictions of decay.After
Luther the extreme puritanical elements of Reformation in Northern
France, Holland, Münster and Britain will render this “precipitation
theology” even more impatient, even again Anglican England and Anglican
rule in the Thirteen Colonies of Northern America, as tragic events
testify it like the beheading of King Charles I due to Cromwell
puritanical revolution. This way of seeing history as a deep malediction
has been inherited by the Founding Fathers in the future United States.
With the deist tradition in England and in the Whig political tradition
both in Britain and Northern America, this “precipitation theology”
will be skillfully rationalized and given an enlightened varnish that
will culminate in President Wilson’s design to purge the world of evil.
The “precipitation philosophy” (and not “theology”) of French
philosophers will lead to a secular political eschatology under the
shadow of the guillotine, under which all those who were supposed to
slow the process had to perish preventively. After Wilson, several
American diplomats will coin principles preventing the very sovereignty
of States to express itself by launching all kind of pro-active projects
with or without wars. Since the collapse of the Soviet system, the
rationally disguised “precipitation theology” will once again run amuck.
You know the results: catastrophe in the Balkans, stalemate in Iraq,
endless war in Syria and Afghanistan. “Precipitation theology” as
feature of the Western world, of the world lead by the Western
hemisphere or by the realms West of Western Europe or of Central Europe,
offers no valuable solution to the problems that inevitably occur in
the imperfect world under the perfect Uranic Heavens. The views of
Charles V consisted in slowing down the process and in leading moderate
military operations against the rebels. It was a better stance anyway. In
the Nineties, I discovered that China and many other Asian countries
developed an alternative way to harmonize international relations,
excluding among other things the post-Wilsonian principle of intervening
violently in other countries’ affairs. This is the principle adopted
not only by Xi Ping’s China today but also by Putin and Lavrov. The
Chinese alternative excludes for instance the policy of “regime change”
that has thrown Iraq and Syria in these atrocious civil wars the
previous Baathist regimes could wisely but nevertheless ruthlessly
avoid. But isn’t it better to have a ruthless “katechonical” although
imperfect regime than to see hundreds of thousands innocent people
killed in senseless attacks, bombing, shelling or Taliban/Salafist
slaughters? The “precipitation theology” of
post-puritanical/neo-Wilsonian America and of Salafist Muslims
has created chaos in otherwise seemly calm countries. Didn’t Luther
himself warn his contemporaries that the Devil was able to use the
theological speak (or “newspeak”) to dupe the people?

Russia
is important in this general frame of a “katechonical” interpretation
of history as an antidote to the “crazy eschatological” one. Russia is
heir of Byzantium also direct heir of the “Roman form”. It was
considered as the stronghold of conservatism before 1917, even if this
conservatism was fossilized by Konstantin Pobedonostsev as Dmitri
Merezhkovski, who rejected later all the aspects of the Soviet
revolution, could observe. Russia hasn’t experiment the traumatic 16th
century Reformation and its contemporary iconoclast rage and was later
preserved from the silliest deist or frenchified philosophy of the 18th
century. This doesn’t mean that Russia was a backward country:
Catharina II was a female enlightened despot that has made of Russia a
great power; Alexander I had traditional and appeasing ideas on
religion, that we should study attentively now after the Syrian
disaster; Alexander II modernized the country at full speed at the end
of the 19th century and could wipe out the disadvantages
Russia had inherited from the 1856 Paris Treaty after the Crimean War,
etc. But Russia, except during the first decennia of the Bolshevik
regime, seems to have remained immune to the dangerous toxicity of
“precipitation theology”. The
Byzantine style of developing chess-like strategies instead of looking
for immediate retaliation or aggression has finally inspired Russian
diplomats and statesmen. Byzantine style and Chinese Confucian harmony
can serve nowadays as practical alternative models in a Western world
confused by media propaganda which has ceaselessly conveyed a modernist
post-puritanical form or another of “precipitation theology”. Therefore
the Eurasian idea, provided it conveys this “katechonical”
precipitation-less ideas similar to those Charles V wanted to apply in
his Empire before confronting the Ottomans, is the real alternative to a
world that would otherwise be ruled and perverted by a superpower that
draws his principles from the craziest adepts of the former
“precipitation theology” of its own “Founding Fathers”. I
could add that a “precipitation theology or ideology” doesn’t express
itself by all sorts of millennial pseudo-religious babbling claptrap
like the one which is predicated for instance in Latin America but can
also act as an economic fundamentalism like the neoliberal craze that
affects America and Europe since the end of the Seventies. Puritanism
can also quite often be reversed in its diametral contrary i. e.
postmodernist debauch what explains that millennials, femens, pussy
rioters, Salafists, neoliberal “banksters”, media moguls, color
revolutionists, etc. follows on the international chessboard the same “4th
Generation Warfare” agenda. Aim is to destroy all the dams civilization
has set to serve the “Katechon” or the Aristotelian “Spoudaios”. We
must define ourselves as the humble servants of the Katechon against the
pretentious designs of the “precipitators”. This means serving the
imperial powers and fighting the powers that are perverted by the
“precipitators”. Or having a Eurasian option and not an Atlanticist one.Q.: You
are a supporter of Eurasianism. It clearly separates you from those who
share the hard-line nationalist positions and many thinkers, or alleged
thinkers from the right. Your geopolitical thought is, as you say, a
response to the thought of the American strategist of Brzezinski and is
deeply rooted in European tradition. Can you basically explain your
geopolitical conception?A.:
You could indeed count me among the supporters of a neo-Eurasianism but
the roots of my own Eurasianism are perhaps quite different than those
attributed to traditional or new Russian Eurasianism; nevertheless these
different perspectives do not collide as antagonisms; on the contrary
they could perfectly complete each other to promote a worldwide
anti-system resistance movement. The most important thing if you want to
develop a strong Eurasianist movement is to have simultaneously a wide
vision on the history of each political historical component of the
combined territory of Europe and Asia and to give oneself for task to
study it by looking for convergences and not for enmities. This had
already been suggested by Prof. Otto Hoetzsch in the Twenties and
Thirties for West Europe and Russia. Therefore one first step would be
to find as far back as possible in history a convergence between West
European powers and Russia as a Eurasian entity. Peter the Great, as you
know, connected Russia to Europe by opening a window on the Baltic Sea,
leading unfortunately to a vicious war with Sweden at the beginning of
the 18th century. But after the vicissitudes of the Seven
Years’ War (1756-1763), France, Austria and Russia were allies and the
territory of their realms extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
being de facto a Eurasian alliance. Leibniz, who was not only a
philosopher and a mathematician but also a diplomat and a political
adviser was in a first step quite distrustful in front of Russia as a
new power because it could have been a new “Mongol Khanate” or a
“Tartary” threatening Europe. In a second step, seeing with benevolence
the development of Peter’s Russia, he started to perceive gigantic
Russia as the necessary territorial link that would enable
communications between Europe and the two old civilizational spaces that
were at his time China and India, that had a quite higher level of
civilization than Europe at that time, as present-day historians
remember it, like Ian Matthew Morris in Britain (in: Why the West Rules – For Now…) and the Indian teaching in England, Pankaj Mishra (in: From the Ruins of the Empire and Begegnungen mit China und seinen Nachbarn).
Pankaj Mishra is a typical Third World ideologist displaying some sort
of resentment against the West, more specifically against the former
British rule in India.

During the short period when France, Austria and Russia were allies important Eurasian designs avant la lettre
were initiated: the development of a strong French fleet in order to
avenge the disastrous defeats of Louis XV in Canada and India during the
Seven Years’ War, the exploration of the Pacific Ocean by Russian and
French sea captains, the common efforts of Austria and Russia to
liberate the Balkans and the Northern coast of the Black Sea with Crimea
as the main territorial asset enabling to settle a first important
Russian navy base in the Pontic area. The French fleet defeated the
English in Northern America in 1783 which made possible the complete
independence of the United States (!). Russia could conquer Alaska,
build a stronghold in California and contemplate a strong
Russian-Spanish alliance in the New World. Russian sailors could land in
the Hawaii Islands and claim them for their Czar. The French
explorations in the Pacific were on many levels very fruitful and one
should never forget that Louis XVI some few minutes before going up the
stairs of the scaffold where he was to be guillotined asked news of La
Pérouse, who had been lost while exploring the Northern shores of the
Pacific. This first Eurasian design avant la lettre was
torpedoed by the French revolutionists paid and excited by the English
and Pitt’s secret services according to the historian Olivier Blanc (in:
Les Hommes de Londres, histoire secrète de la Terreur, 1989).
Pitt wanted to get rid of a regime that promoted the development of a
fleet and had outlined the guidelines of French world politics.

The second Eurasian project avant la lettre
was the very short-lived “Holy Alliance” or “Pentarchy” created in the
aftermath of the Treaty of Vienna in 1814. It allowed the independence
of Greece but failed after the independence of Belgium when England and
France helped to destroy the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The
“Holy Alliance” definitively crumbled down when the Crimea War started
as two Western powers of the “Pentarchy” clashed with Russia. The
Anti-Western affect spread widely in Russia and the core ideas of it are
clearly outlined in Dostoyevsky’s main political book, A Writer’s Diary,
written after his Siberian exile and the Russian-Turkish War of
1877-78. The West permanently plots against Russia and Russia has to
defend itself against these constant endeavors to erode its power and
its domestic stability. But
now back to Eurasia: two important books have been published in recent
years that should be the bedside books of all those who are animated by
the Eurasist idea: Prof. Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road – A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (2009) and Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads – A New History of the World
(2015). Beckwith’s book is the most complete panorama of Eurasian
history: the core ideas from his captivating chapters I now constantly
keep in mind are first the fact that in a very far past Indo-Iranian
horsemen tribes coined sets of rules that determined all the future
organization schemes of kingdoms and empires on the Silk Road; second,
Beckwith states that modern times and modern ideologies ruined
completely the sublime accomplishments of the Central Asian realms
throughout the ages. A new Eurasianism should then have as main task to
restore the spirit that allowed these extraordinary achievements. Prof.
Beckwith masters a good dozen of ancient and modern languages spoken or
having been spoken in Central Asia, a tremendous wide knowledge that
enables him to understand more thoroughly the old texts and the very
spirit that enhanced the thriving of kingdoms and empires.

Peter
Frankopan’s book is more factual but also enables to criticize the
Western arrogant attitude namely in Iran. The chapters in his book
dedicated to old Persia and modern Iran would allow diplomats to settle
bases for a renewed cooperation between European powers and Iran,
provided, of course, that Europeans really would abandon the guidelines
dictated by NATO and the United States. Eurasianism compels you to study
history more thoroughly than the present-day Western way of leading
policies in the world. Facts shouldn’t be ignored or disregarded simply
because they don’t fit into the schemes of the superficial
interpretation of the Enlightenment the Western powers are currently
handling, provoking at the same time a concatenation of catastrophes.

Indeed
the intellectual acceptation of the excellence of past and present
Asian or Central Asian traditions and the will to pacify the immense
territory between Western Europe and China lead us to dismiss the
Brzezinski project of launching a permanent war (as an updating of the
Trotskite project of “permanent revolution” that the neocons partook in a
“former life”) and to favor the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” project,
which is the only serious project for the 21st century.Q.: The
United States itself today is undergoing a difficult and comprehensive
crisis. Trump and trumpism are certainly not the cause but the
consequences. On the other hand, with the rise of Russia and China, the
geopolitical situation in the world has changed, the world is no longer
unipolar. Hal Brands for liberal Bloomberg notes that US foreign policy
has reached its historic critical point, that the project of
globalization of its political model faces failure, that the main goal
of the US in the future will be to defend the „world's liberal order“.
In other words, the time of American hegemony is nearing its end, and
the events in the Middle East, in Syria, as it seems, speak in favor...A.:
This is not a question of yours but a general statement that easily be
shared by alternative minds. The crisis the United States are undergoing
nowadays can be explained by the inadequacy of the
religious/ideological core of its „deep state“ in front of the plurality
of actual or potential world views that could be as efficient as the
mix of religious puritanism, deism and wilsonism that gave the United
States an incredible strength during the 20th century. The puritanical
core of radical protestantism, as seen in Dutch or British history at
the time of the iconoclasts or Cromwell’s Roundheads. The attitude of
these radicals is a savage rejection of past heritages and a will to
eradicate everything that’s judged „impure“ or „belonging“ to a „bad
past“, exactly along the same lines the Wahhabites are currently working
in the Near East. If you share such views you start indeed an eternal
war against the entire world. But this is practically impossible on the
long run. Resistances emerge permanently and some countries or
civilizational areas can always be considered as breakwaters, especially
as they have enough power or space to avoid invasion, i. e. if they can
offer a sufficient „mass“, as Elias Canetti once wrote, to resist on
the long term. Even Afghanistan is a „mass“ able to resist but of course
not to reverse the trend. Russia and China can together offer such a
„mass“ but the struggle will nevertheless be hard as the Latin American
part of the BRICS has more or less be compelled to surrender or to
weaken its position. Venezuela undergoes a „color revolution“ that risks
to bring it back in the so-called backyard of the United States. In
the near future, the United States will as a consequence try to keep
its domination on Western Europe (even if on the other hand they try to
weaken it through uncontrolled migrations and Soros initiatives), on
Latin America and especially on Africa, where they develop a new form of
imperialism through the AFRICOM command structure to counter the
Chinese and to kick the French out of their „Françafrique“, while wooing
them to participate in the process of their own neutralization!
Nevertheless this policy is due to fail as such an ubiquitous control is
impossible on the basis of a mass of 350 millions taxpayers. Such a
„mass“ has been useful till the end of the 1990s as it allowed the
Atlantic superpower to launch military and civilian R&D programs
that could be made profitable on all levels in a sufficiently short term
to build up the real hardpower of Washington and to be always ahead of
their opponents. But 350 millions consumers and taxpayers are now no
longer sufficient to sustain the competition.

The
project of a „Big Society“, which would have given the American
citizens a social security system as in Europe, has been hampered by the
Vietnam war. The Reaganomics ruined huge urban areas such as Detroit.
At the end of the line, American society has become steadily unstable,
the racial issues and the ubiquitous drug problem making both the
situation even more complicated: these two issues may let us conclude
that the Soros initiatives aim deliberately at creating an even worse
racial situation in Europe so that European nations couldn’t be able to
challenge the former main superpower of the West and that the drug
problem is in a certain sense a serious backlash if you keep in mind
that drugs were introduced in the 1960s due to special CIA ops in Laos
and Burma where Chinese opponents were cultivating the weeds in order to
finance potential nationalist insurrections in Maoist China. The secret
services’ support to drug smugglers allowed indirectly a financing of
the Vietnam war that Congress would never have voted. Drugs, unsolved
domestic conflicts in race mixed areas and neoliberal Reaganomics were
and are all expediencies that have left behind significant marks in the
American society and, above all, created a junk culture they cannot get
rid of anymore. The countries that will be strong enough to resist to
the effects of this junk culture and to reject it will be resilient. The
other ones will perish slowly. Q.: You
learn Russian and studied Russian culture. Also, in your research, you
have paid special attention to the traditions and ethnos of the East of
Europe. For example, to Scythians, the indo-European ethnicity that
inhabited the Eurasian steppe, south of Russia, and is extremely
important in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. Slavic cultures, including
the Serbian and the Slavs of Balkans, unfortunately, have not been
sufficiently studied in the West of Europe. Do you have the impression
that the Slavic heritage is not only not well known, but also
systematically suppressed and underestimated in Western Europe?A.:
I never learned Russian properly but it’s true that as teenagers my
friends and I were seduced by Russian history and fascinated by the
conquest of Siberia from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. When I started
to publish my journals at the beginning of the 1980s, I was deeply
influenced by a German cultural and political trend that had emerged a
couple of years before. This trend took into account the nationalist
elements of the left-wing movements since the 19th century
and also all the diplomatic traditions that had favored an alliance
between Germany and Russia (or the Soviet Union). The Germans, but also
the people in the Low Countries, were upset because the US Army had
deployed deadly missiles in Central Europe, compelling the Soviets to do
the same so that in case of war Central Europe would have been
definitively nuked. No one could accept such a policy and the result of
that was the birth of the pacifist neutralist movement that lasted till
the fall of the Berlin Wall and that allowed incredible convergences
between left-wing and conservative or nationalist groups.

In
the frame of this movement, we started to translate or summarize German
texts or debates in order to show that history could have been
different and that the will to analyze the past with other eyes could
open perspectives for a different future. We didn’t reduce our research
to German questions but broaden it in order to see things from an
“All-European” point of view. We stated of course that history had been
reduced to Western European history, what was an intellectually
unacceptable reductionism that I could spot very early by reading some
books on East European countries while writing down an end paper at the
end of my secondary school studies. My friends and I didn’t reduce our
readings to contemporary history but widen them to medieval and ancient
history. So we were attracted by the Scythians, namely after having read
a book of the French historian Arthur Conte, where he reminded us that
many Slavic people trace back their origins not only from Slavic tribes
but also from Sarmatians knights, including those who had formerly built
up the cavalry of the Roman Legions.

The
Sarmatian element is not only important for Slavic people but also for
the West that has tried to wipe out this heritage from the collective
memory. Nevertheless, British historians, with the help of Polish
colleagues, admit now that Sarmatian Knights are at the origin of the
Celtic Arthurian myths, as the Roman cavalry in Roman Britain was partly
or mainly composed of Sarmatian Knights.

The
German historian Reinhard Schmoeckel hypothezises that even the
Merovingians, from whom Chlodowegh (Clovis for the French) descended,
were partly Sarmatian and not purely Germanic. In Spain, historians
admit that among the Visigoths and the Sueves that invaded the peninsula
as Germanic tribes were accompanied by Alans, a horsemen people from
the Caspian and Caucasus area. The traditions they brought to Spain are
at the origin of the chivalry orders that helped a lot to perform the
Reconquista. As you say, all that has been neglected but now things are
changing. In my short essay on the geopoliticians in Berlin between both
world wars, I remember a poor sympathetic professor who tried to coin a
new historiography in Europe taking the Eastern elements into accounts
but whose impressive collection of documents were completely destroyed
during the battle for Berlin in 1945. His name was Otto Hoetzsch. He was
a Slavic philologist, a translator (namely during the negotiations of
the Rapallo Treaty, 1922) and a historian of Russia: he pleaded for a
common European historiography stressing the convergences and not the
differences leading to catastrophic conflicts like the German-Russian
wars of the 20th century. I wrote that we all have to walk in his footsteps. I suppose you agree.